The Georgian oligarch who played high stakes in a lethal game

We profile Badri Patarkatshisvili, the Georgian billionaire who died at his home in Surrey recently of an apparent heart attack.

"If you have ever seen Georgian food, you wonder why people who eat it on a regular basis live to be 20," noted one of Badri Patarkatshisvili's business associates after the billionaire oligarch's death, apparently from heart failure, last week. Stress also causes heart attacks and Patarkatshishvili had had a lifetime of it.

"His exotic journey to wealth, power and exile included high-stakes political gambles that would have left milder characters twitching in terror," says The Economist. And as a 52-year-old smoker, he wasn't far off average life expectancy for men of his background. Yet although the police, who swept his Surrey mansion for poison and radiation found nothing, the conspiracy theories continue.

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